Xiroth writes "In what could be the first step to backing down on the plans to censor the Australian Internet, Communication Minister Stephen Conroy has made it known that the live trials of the Government filter will not, in fact, be live, instead being downgraded to a closed network test. Given that this would provide no further information than what Government tests have already provided, this may prove to be a face-saving measure before the plan is quietly scrapped. Nonetheless, concerned Australians are encouraged to attend protests planned for this weekend to ensure that the Government gets the message."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nitro2k01 investigates using the versatile Arduino platform for use as synthesizer modules -

The idea of using my Arduino for modular synth utilities started out as a crazy idea that I’m now starting to seriously like. The pictures above shows my first design, an oscillator. (I have plans for other modules, see the bottom of this post)
The left picture shows the first prototype where I tried to use PCM to produce the sound. That didn’t sound too good, so I built an 8-bit resistor ladder passive DAC. But I only hade enough of one resistor value, so I used only that value. This gives a non-linear output voltage response. (Distorsion) Additionally I’m only using 6 of the possible 8 bits, further degrading the sound quality. The input voltage response does not conform to any standard (Eg 1V/octave) but has a inversely proportional relationship (f(V)=c*1/V, where V is the voltage, c is some constant and f is the resulting frequency) This relationship is not completely unlike how a Gameboy responds to sound values that you write to it’s sound controller. However, surprisingly enough, it seemed almost impossible to hit musically dissonant intervals, so it seems like I did something right.

Definite potential for this application - a control voltage sequencer should be pretty straightforward to implement. Check out the site for detailed samples, analysis, and ideas for future iterations. - ModularDuino

Arduino Pocket Piano Synth Kit

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The main thing that kicked off all the negative attention over EA's use of SecuROM DRM in Spore was the avalanche of negative reviews on Amazon. It seems consumers are beginning to recognize that such a rush of negative reviews is an effective way to protest and garner attention. The latest product getting the same treatment appears to be TurboTax from Intuit, where people are protesting a big price increase from last year. Any bets on whether or not a "glitch" will cause Amazon to delete the reviews, as has happened with previous waves of negative comments?

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jammag writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ and a professor at Texas A&M, weighs in on the problems in today's CS programs. In particular, Java (there's too much of it), the quality of graduates (companies aren't happy), and the need to balance the theoretical and the practical (long overdue). Not pulling punches, Stroustrup even talks about high schools — 'High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally.' He finishes by giving advice to working developers: 'Serious programming is a team sport, brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.'" Read on for more choice quotes from the quotable professor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Piskor says:

Over the past year I put together a few graphic novels dedicated to hacking/phone phreaking/hi-tech history/culture. Thanks to some really great reviews on different podcasts, blogs, and forums, I've been able to distribute my books completely myself via my website completely bypassing traditional book distribution methods.

There is a lot of historical/semi-historical references within like Steve Jobs and Woz in Alice in Wonderland garb selling Blue Boxes.

MAKE Gift certificates are available - Can't decide what to get your favorite Maker, Crafter or Hacker? Give them a gift certificate good for anything from the Maker Shed with the amount you choose. And best yet, you can choose to email it to them and avoid those long postal deliveries. A great last minute present that could spark a lifetime of making.

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The Open Reel Ensemble plasticizes voice and instrument recordings by way of USB controlled reel-to-reel tape machines.

Sound Performance with Bending Reel-to-Reel Tape Decks. I Remade Old Reel-to-Reel Analog Tape Recorders to Musical Instruments and Enjoyed Music Session with Companion in University. And We Performed Music by Using this Instruments. ("Open Reel Ensemble" Will Perform 12th Japan Media Arts Festival in February, 2009)

plus the gear looks rather neat-o! - Open Reel Ensemble [via Califaudio]

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coondoggie writes "Seven leading domain name vendors — representing more than 112 million domain names, or 65% of all registered names — have formed an industry coalition to work together to adopt DNSSEC. Members of the DNSSEC Industry Coalition include: VeriSign, which operates the .com and .net registries; NeuStar, which operates the .biz and .us registries; .info operator Afilias Limited; .edu operator EDUCAUSE; and The Public Interest Registry, which operates .org." The gTLD operators are falling in line behind government initiatives, which we discussed last month. In light of these developments, Dan Bernstein's push for DNSCurve might face an uphill slog. Reader data2 writes: "Dan Berstein, the creator of djbdns and daemontools, has created his own proposal to improve upon the current DNS protocol. He has been opposed to DNSSEC for quite some time, and now he has proposed a concrete alternative, DNSCurve. He has posted a comparison between the two systems. His proposal makes use of elliptic curves, while DNSSEC favors RSA. He uses a curve named Curve25519, which he also developed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daily Routines is a blog that describes the daily routines of well-known people (mostly writers). I find it fascinating.

John Updike You've said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?

Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life. There's a letter. And most people have junk in their lives but I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.

We've spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There's a lot to be said for having a routine you can't run away from.

Right. It saves you from giving up.

Daily Routines (via Kottke)

Lawrence Lessig posted a good rant about bailouts today:

These bailouts are an awful idea -- the worst of K St. capitalism (== kapitalism) inviting an insanely bad future for the industries affected. If there's one thing worse than Detroit managed by the managers who have been driving the American auto industry into the ground for the past three decades, it is Detroit managed by politicians.

...

People speak about this as if not bailing out Detroit means automobile production in America ends. That's not what failing to bailout Detroit means. Not intervening now would be these automakers would enter bankruptcy. And bankruptcy means the assets of these dinosaurs get reorganized: Someone else buys these companies, at a price the market sets, and runs them profitably, because of the price the market set.

People in Japan who enjoy sharing news about odors can use Nioibu.com to mark their location and circumstances.

A few examples: watermelon smell, ferret odor, old lady stench, gasoline fumes, and curry.

I have a presentation that I've done many times now for various corporate execs (usually from Europe) trying to understand just what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. It's a fun presentation, and always creates quite a discussion. It goes into a lot of different topic areas, but my favorite part is, right in the middle of my "abbreviated history" of Silicon Valley, when I get to show some clips from Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo of what he was working on at SRI. That demo was the first time the world saw an awful lot of things that are common today: from the mouse (and, yes, he talks about naming the mouse), to a graphical user interface, to hyperlinks, among many other things (including a few computer bugs). I just gave the presentation again two weeks ago, and I realized that we were quickly approaching the 40th anniversary of the demo, which took place on December 9th, 1968.

The entire presentation is 75 minutes long, but I've embedded it below. I'm sure many of you won't have time to watch all 75 minutes, but it's absolutely worth watching at least part of it (and then you'll want to keep watching):

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jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raelinda Woad is a storyteller and jewelry maker.

She began in jewelry in the 1980's working her way up from bead sorter to jewelry maker's assistant.

On New Years Eve of 1989 Raelinda had a chocolate induced vision: Become a storyteller! Two years later she was sharing her 'true stories that haven't quite happened yet' with coffeehouse audiences across New England. This led her to create and host StoryLAB, a storytelling concert series in Harvard Square's legendary Club Passim.

In the early 90's Raelinda combined her love of storytelling with her skill as a jewelry designer. The result was Storyteller Jewelry, a line of wearable books with her own coffeehouse stories hidden inside.

Take a look at some of her work, and maybe even read one of her stories.

Do you tell stories? How do you combine your various creative selves? Add your comments below, or send your photos to the Make Flickr Pool.

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Here's a pretty cool video for Field Music's "In Context" featuring one very long sharpie line - eventually revealed as a sort of contour-drawing mural. Aah yes, drawing all over your walls does equal sweet, sweet freedom.

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m2pc writes "The US Postal Service is experiencing major server issues for its shipping API web services. After spending about an hour debugging my own eCommerce software for a client, I found the problem was with the USPS shipping servers being unavailable. Further research showed that message boards for OS Commerce and other e-Commerce packages are filling with posts from angry users who are experiencing crashing Web store applications and frustrated customers. Developers are scrambling to find interim solutions, from hard-coding fixed price shipping, to 'rolling their own' shipping calculation APIs based on the USPS Fixed Rate Zone Tables, to disabling the USPS option altogether. One user reported yesterday that a call to USPS yielded the response 'we expect it to be down all day.' As of 9:20 AM PST the service is still unavailable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roger Asling wrote a program that draws pattens of polygons generated from a string of digital "DNA." He then mutated the DNA and selected the DNA that generated polygons that looked more like the source image (in this case, Mona Lisa) to live and have mutant babies. He repeated the process 904,314 times until he ended up with a 50 polygon image that looks just like the Mona Lisa. Genetic Programming: Evolution Of The Mona Lisa (Via Presurfer)

The always-crafty and industrious Jeffrey and Jillian over at Because We Can have created these really cool CNC-milled puzzle-like wooden robots. They stand 10" tall and are made from 100% sustainably-harvested American Maple. Finished with water-based dyes and waterborne lacquer. Available in blue, dark brown and blonde. $40 each.

They also sell some pretty awesome wooden CNC-cut Christmas trees for $35 each. Very Dr. Seuss meets Tim Burton, i.e. pure win!

Wooden Robots
Tiny Xmas Trees

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We already had a post discussing how we find it troubling that Warner Music has not been more open in discussing its proposed "voluntary license" plan. It was a neat little rhetorical trick by Warner to claim that we weren't being fair in slamming the proposal so early, when the company itself had kept the plans secret all along. Would they have preferred until they rolled out the "completed" plan for us to point out its problems?

Either way, while we discussed why it was a bad plan in our original post, some are not convinced it's a bad plan. Matt Asay, over at News.com gives his qualified support for the plan, while Nate Anderson at Ars Technica pretty much takes Warner's party line that we're being unfair in criticizing this idea before it's had a chance to air out. Of course, Anderson conveniently skips the fact that Warner wasn't letting the plan air out. These discussions were being held without important stakeholders, where key problems with the plan would not get discussed. Besides, given how many times the major record labels have come up with new great plans that actually made life worse for consumers, I would think the industry has to earn the right to be given the benefit of the doubt. We've been fooled too many times.

Anderson also mischaracterizes our position greatly -- first claiming that we're only kicking the plan because of our "knee-jerk churlishness" and need "to jackboot the music industry in the proverbial groin every time it comes up with a new idea." That makes for nice prose, but pretty much ignores any substance behind our position. In fact, Anderson seems to claim the only reason we dislike the plan is because we called it a "tax" insisting that was the "sum total" of our analysis. This, of course, is untrue -- and Anderson and his co-authors at Ars Technica are well aware of the more than a decade we've put into analyzing music industry business models, including cheering on good models (and even cheering on the big record labels when they do something right). Why Anderson and Ars Technica chose to misrepresent all of that (while throwing in some unwarranted insults), I do not know, but I'll take the blame, and suggest that perhaps we did not explain our position clearly.

So, I'll try again.

Why A "Voluntary License" Is A Bad Idea

Yes, the industry gets upset when anyone calls this a "tax" so I'll use the "voluntary license" term, even though tax is much more accurate. A true voluntary license wouldn't require everyone having a certain provider to opt-in, but that's exactly what this plan would require. In fact, as the slides indicate, eventually it would basically require all ISPs to "opt-in" forcing all of their members to "opt-in." Suddenly, everyone has to pay. That's not a voluntary license. It's a tax.

However, even if we step back and pretend it's really a voluntary license, and even if we grant the premise that all record labels sign up for this plan, you've still created a mess that doesn't help anyone. First, you have to set up a huge bureaucracy to manage this process -- and it is quite a process. You need someone to monitor everything that's happening online to determine whose music is actually being shared and played. You have to somehow create methods to accurately determine -- from the biggest to the smallest -- who actually deserves payment. And, if you don't think that process won't be gamed, you apparently just got on the internet in the last year. As soon as there's the ability to get paid out just because more people are sharing your music, just watch the games that folks take to make sure they get a larger cut. The system will punish honest artists, and reward the scammers.

Next, you have to set up another bureaucracy in charge of managing all of this money, and figuring out how to dole it out (while keeping a cut for itself). Even if this operation is, as planned, a "non-profit" -- don't think it will be cheap. You're talking about a huge operation that is tasked with determining how much money every musician in the world is owed, and then trying to get that money to them. Given the recording industry's history with not being able to "find" some big name musicians, just take a guess how well this will work here? Instead, there's a better than even chance that eventually, the big record labels will note that it's "easier" and "more efficient" for this "third party" bureaucracy to just send a big check to the labels each month, and let them dole out the money to their artists (after taking a cut, of course).

And, of course, there's the whole question of what the rules will be for determining how much each artist will make. Over the summer, we had a look at the sausage making process for compulsory licensing, and it's not pretty. Basically, you get backroom deals combined with senile "copyright board" judges who don't understand the marketplace or technology making final determinations on exactly how much every action is worth. We've already got too many different compulsory licenses to count. All this will really be doing is adding yet another one to the list. It doesn't simplify things -- it complicates them even more. The recording industry, of course, loves that complication. It lets them come in and "handle" things, which most of the time means twisting the rules to its advantage.

Yes, the EFF and Public Knowledge favors some form of "voluntary license," and Warner Music and Griffin are quick to play that up, as if their plan has won some kind of public approval. But the reality is quite different. Someone from Public Knowledge was quick to show up in our comments (where Warner Music still fears to tread, for some reason) to point out that they have not endorsed this plan, but are open to discussions on it. The EFF has also been cautious, noting in the past that it does not support a license that is called voluntary, but is really compulsory. In the end, though, I simply disagree with the EFF on the benefits of any sort of licensing plan. Fred von Lohmann once explained his support to me as such: "A voluntary licensing plan basically gets the issue off of consumers, and lets everyone else fight it out in court."

That sounds nice, but ignores the unintended consequences. The big record labels have shown over and over again that they can twist the process to their advantage. So while it may be true that consumers won't be getting sued any more, it doesn't mean they won't get screwed. The plans will weigh heavily to the advantage of the established recording industry with its leverage in the space. It's a really, really sad situation that we should feel like rewarding the industry for its decade of actively fighting against progress by saying "well, phew, as long as you agree to stop suing, here's as huge chunk of money."

Have you noticed a pattern here? What you're doing is setting up a big, centrally planned and operated bureau of music, that officially determines the business model of the recording industry, figures out who gets paid, collects the money and pays some money out. The same record industry that has fought so hard against any innovation remains in charge and will have tremendous sway in setting the "rules." The plan leaves no room for creativity. It leaves no room for innovation. It's basically picking the only business model and encoding it in stone.

Oh, and did we mention it's only for music? Next we'll have to create another huge bureaucracy and "license" for movies. And for television. And, what about non-television, non-movie video content? Surely the Star Wars kid deserves his cut? And, newspapers? Can't forget the newspapers. After all, they need the money, so we might as well add a license for news. And, if that's going to happen, then certainly us bloggers should get our cut as well. Everyone, line right up!

This is a bad plan that will create a nightmare bureaucracy while making people pay a lot more, without doing much to actually reward musicians.

And, worst of all, it's totally unnecessary.

So What's The Alternative?

But then, as people will be quick to note: what's the alternative? If we don't do this, then how will musicians get paid? This, of course, is a logic fallacy that assumes incorrectly that musicians only make money from the direct sale of music. Musicians that are already embracing business models based on a solid understanding of information economics are discovering they can do quite well (almost always better than under the old model). And, yes, this applies to both big and small musicians.

The basics are pretty straightforward, and if you're new here, you should follow the links to understand them more thoroughly. But musicians get to use their already-created content, which are effectively infinite due to its digital nature, to grow the market for all of the scarcities that surround them. This can include physical goods, but the bigger money is in non-tangible scarce goods that simply can't be copied: access to the musicians, seats at a concert, the ability to create new music and many other opportunities that have the side benefit of more closely tying fans to the musician. And this doesn't need to be complicated. You could set the whole thing up as a subscription fan club with different levels providing different scarce benefits -- and everyone wins.

The simple fact is that these business models are already working for many, many musicians. Hardly a day goes by where someone doesn't show us yet another example of musicians creatively coming up with new and unique business models that embrace these economic principles, and which allow them to make even more money than they did in the past. And, yes, there's still room for the record labels if they want to act as true partners, helping musicians implement these business models and enabling musicians to better connect with their true fans.

Of course, that involves some work. It involves a real change in how business is done. It may not be as easy as a plan that lets the record labels sit back and collect large sums of money with promises to distribute it, but it can be a lot more profitable for everyone in the long run. It's more efficient. It allows true competition to take place in the marketplace, rather than letting the market set the winning model. It lets people share music without worry of a lawsuit (in fact, if the business model is implemented correctly, it gets musicians to encourage more file sharing as it helps build up a larger audience for those scarce goods). Without having to fund those huge bureaucracies, there's also much more money that can go to the actual artists as well. Plus, fans feel better knowing that their money actually is supporting the artists, rather than a central bureaucracy.

But the important point is that this plan is working today for many different players in the music world, including some smarter labels and (most importantly) the fans. The only ones it's not working for are the big record labels who have refused to recognize the opportunities -- and the bands that rely on those labels for guidance. We shouldn't be setting up a system to reward those folks, just as everyone else is figuring out how to succeed.

Let The Market Work

Jim Griffin and Warner Music have been working behind closed doors, trying to craft the perfect business model that preserves their business. During that same period, a large number of folks have been out here, actually involved in an open conversation about business models that are working today. We've seen artist after artist learn (on purpose or accidentally) how to embrace these concepts and how to succeed beyond anything they ever saw in the past.

Let's not kill that off with a plan worked out in the backrooms that will almost definitely have significant unintended consequences. Let's let the market work its magic transparently.

Griffin's complaint about our post (delivered via Warner Music) was that it was unfair of us to criticize a plan so early in the planning stages. We made no such complaint here when we first laid out these discussions so many years ago. We encouraged people to criticize and discuss the plans -- and for people to test them out. That resulted in more discussions and more experiments and adjustments and we're seeing the end result of that now -- with many, many success stories. Griffin's plan allows for no such experimentation. It's an all or nothing plan, and if you accept it as currently laid out, you're going all in when half the rules of the game are being established without the players' knowledge.

That's a bad, bad bet.

If Jim Griffin wants us to hold back on criticizing his plan, why can't he and Warner hold back on implementing their plan that effectively blocks out the market forces that are already succeeding?

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Wanna cook a pizza at home, but are unwilling to cut up your oven so that you can get the self-clean cycle to run up to 800 degrees to get the crust just right? Try Heston "Fat Duck" Blumenthal's technique: stick an upside-down cast-iron skillet under the broiler, crank the heat up to max for 20 minutes and lay a slab of pizza dough (even the gunk from Domino's will do) for a minute and a half.

And here’s the good news: Although the Domino's dough looks horrid compared to the corner pizza’s store (dense and flat and a weird color), for thin-crust pizzas made in this cast-iron-and-broiler fashion, Domino's is actually ... really good. In a four-person blind-taste test, the favorite between Domino's and our corner pizzeria was split right down the middle. Honest. People couldn’t tell the difference. And the Domino's dough, probably due to some mysterious ingredients, was very, very easy to stretch into a pie. This cooking technique took dough from one of the worst pizzas available and made it taste good. The fact that Domino's foists doughy, disgusting pizzas on the public when it could easily do otherwise is almost a crime.

Pizza Hack: Broil Your Pies (via Kottke)

edmicman sends word of a Fox News report about a Michigan State University student who is facing suspension for bulk emailing a number of professors at the university about a proposed change to the school calendar — an e-mail that the university is labeling spam. The article contains links to a copy of the original email, the allegations against the student, and the university's Email Acceptable Use Policy. The student, Kara Spencer, asked a Philadelphia rights organization, FIRE, to get involved. The article quotes the FIRE defense program director: "The fact that MSU is considering punishment of Spencer simply for exercising her right to contact selected faculty members by e-mail shows a disturbing disregard for students' freedom of expression. ... Threatening a member of the student government with suspension for sending relevant, timely e-mails to faculty members is outrageous." Spencer is awaiting the school's judgement after a hearing, and vows to take to the courts if suspended.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robyn Miller writes on Cool Tools:

A few weeks ago, my 11 year-old son and I decided to sculpt, so we got out SuperSculpey Firm polymer clay. After working with this newer style of Sculpey for a while, we decided it totally kicks ass on softer styles of Sculpey. Why? Because it doesn't flop over on its side when handled. And it's firm enough to keep its shape when carved. My son began making a tank. So I made a tank. We have yet to paint them.

The Sculpey brands are especially encouraging for beginners, yet professionals artists depend on them as well. Pros ranging from vinyl toy artists to designers for film use it. Unlike normal clay, Sculpey hardly changes shape or size when baked, and hardening takes place quickly, at the relatively low temperatures of a convection oven (even a toaster oven will do).

Because of its polymer base, there's loads of fun techniques to try with Sculpey, like baking your sculpture for only half the allotted time. When you take it out of the oven, prematurely, you'll find your little masterpiece has a soft, rubbery texture. In this state, it won't loose its shape and can be easily carved with a knife or a file. Have you cut too much away? Add a little more Sculpey and put it back in the oven for more cooking!

I buy my Sculpey at my local art supply store, but it can also be found online.

SuperSculpey Firm
$13 (1 pound)
Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Polyform Products Co.

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lurking_giant writes "In a report on NewScientist.com, researchers working on development of a space elevator (an idea we have discussed numerous times) have determined that the concept is not stable. Coriolis force on the moving climbers would cause side loading that would make stability extremely difficult, while solar wind would cause shifting loads on the geostationary midpoint. All of this would likely make it necessary to add thrusters, which would consume fuel and negate the benefits of the concept. Alternatively, careful choreography of multiple loads might ease the instability, again with unknown but negative economic impacts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can search for some magazines through Google Book Search new, of note... Popular Science, Popular Mechanics & Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. All of the magazines also have a map at the bottom so you can see where things were and/or mentioned, oh and some ads from Google - they are likely doing some type of revenue share with the publishers in that program. More info @ the Google blog.

Popular Science. Looks like they have 1890 to almost present.

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Popular Mechanics. Looks like they have 1900 to almost present.

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

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Ive spent the past two days seriously rocking out to the two-disc set Theme Time Radio Hour: With Your Host Bob Dylan, a collection of pop songs with fascinating written introductory material from Dylan. The variety of genres spanned here is amazing, from old reggae to swing to coutnry and western to the White Stripes, and Dylan mixes in rare finds with classics to make a collection that might as well be called "Pop: this is that it's all about" -- 50 incredibly catchy, funny, songs that use a deceptive accessibility to convey all kinds of messages.

Though many are just plain fun -- and amazing. I love Paul Chaplain and His Emeralds's cover of "Shortnin' Bread" -- if you've heard The Cramps version of this, now you know where they got it, a raunchy, rockabilly version with a mad drummer and a crisp, clapped Bo Diddley beat that makes it just rock. Other standouts are Betty Hall Jones's "Buddy, Stay Off the Wine" (imagine Anita O'Day attaining Mae West's cynicism and then singing lyrics by Gilbert and Sullivan); Slim Gaillard's "How High the Moon" (an arrangement so gonzo it might have originated with the Marx Brothers); The Sons of the Pioneers' "Cool Water" (not the version I knew -- a much more upbeat arrangement that makes you want to clap along), two back-to-back covers of "Pistol Packin' Mama" that show just how wide the distance between interpretations can be; and dozens of others.

It's like hitting shuffle on Bob Dylan's MP3 player and hitting the sweetest run of tappin' tracks serendipity has to offer.

Theme Time Radio Hour: With Your Host Bob Dylan

This wonderful illustration was done by Slade Oakes, age 6. His parents found it in his art pad shortly after Slade's dad brought home the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD.

Last week, we broke the story about a presentation being given to various universities about a music "tax" plan. The plan presented wasn't any different from what Jim Griffin (who was hired by Warner to pitch exactly this plan earlier this year) has talked about in the past -- but Warner Music Group was quick to contact us and distance itself from the presentation -- despite the title of the presentation announcing that this was Warner Music Group's plan, and two full slides of "comments from WMG," with one of those slides suggesting people contact Griffin at WMG for more info.

This week, a bunch of news organizations reported on the story -- with some, such as the the Chronicle of Higher Education, just repeating what was already known, while a few added to the story. Wired discovered that the planned name of the organization that would handle the "distribution" of funds would be Choruss. It also found out that EMI and Sony BMG have already signed onto the plan, along with Warner, which initiated it. Universal Music is the major label that's still holding out. Apparently independent labels are able to join up, as well, but the terms aren't at all clear yet.

Portfolio stepped up with its own discussion of the topic, highlighting a key point that I made to the Warner Music rep who called me: this conversation should be public. My conversation with Warner Music was off-the-record at their request, but I tried to defend posting the presentation by noting that this information should be discussed among all the stakeholders, rather than settled in a backroom deal like so many efforts by the recording industry. Otherwise, the parties that are left out of the discussion (generally, consumers) are going to get screwed.

In Jim Griffin's response to my post, he complained that: "At this early stage, many ideas may be discussed and discarded, but efforts to prematurely label or criticize the process only hinder achievement of constructive solutions." I would say back, that, at this early stage, if ideas are being discussed and discarded, why not bring everyone here into the conversation, so that we don't feel like the fix has been put on us after the "finished product" is finally announced from high atop RIAA-mountain? We're more than willing to help, right here on Techdirt.

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Here's a great robot gift guide from the folks at robots.net, Steve writes -

It's time once again for our annual countdown of the top 10 Christmas gift ideas for robot geeks. With the growing popularity of robots, everyone knows at least one person who spends all their time building strange little machines. What do you get them for Christmas? Well, we're here to help. The robots.net founding editors, steve, Rog-a-Matic, and The Swirling Brain have made their lists and checked them twice. Then we took those three lists and, using a carefully measured and computed statistical comparison method that we call "close your eyes and poke things randomly with your finger", we determined what the top 10 gift ideas are. As usual, we've thrown in a few stocking stuffers and extras that we thought were cool even if they didn't make the list

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MAKE's robot gift guide. In the last few years, the world of hobby robotics has exploded. Driven by the plummeting prices and ubiquity of microcontrollers, servomotors, and other electronic and mechanical components, the growth in personal fabrication technologies, and the success of such commercial toy, hobby, and domestic robots as Lego Mindstorms, the Robosapien line, Japanese mini humanoids, and iRobot's cleaning machines, robots are finally becoming rather commonplace (if still only in niche domains). And, of course, the robot growth being seeded by these new technologies is watered by the Big Muddy of the Internet, with its rapid information and idea exchange. The next generation of engineers and industrial designers who'll build tomorrow's robots are growing up with Vex kits and Arduino microcontrollers in their hands today.

For our MAKE Robot Gift Guide, we've put together a sampling of robot-related offerings from the Maker Shed, as well as some other robots we fancy. If you give or get any of these bots for the holidays, or especially if you or your recipients, hack them, we'd love to hear about it.

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A knit piece by Ben Fino-Radin

Here's a cool panel at the New Museum this Friday:

CRAFT HACKERS

Rhizome.org panel discussion

Fri, Dec 12, 2008 | 7:30 PM

New Museum of Contemporary Art

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting techniques to explore high-tech culture and the relationship between needlework and computer programming. Panelists include Cat Mazza, who translates moving images into stills knit in yarn; Christy Matson, who uses Jacquard Looms (some of the earliest computers) to knit landscape images from computer games; Ben Fino-Radin, whose witty needlepoint sculptures translate the World Wide Web into yarn and plastic, one pixel at a time; and Cody Trepte, whose embroidery of retired computer punch cards rekindles an old-fashioned love affair with the hand of the artist.

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Cornwallis writes "In a First Amendment case with implications for everything from neighborhood e-mail lists to national newspapers, a Maryland businessman argued to the state's highest court yesterday that the host of an online forum should be forced to reveal the identities of people who posted allegedly defamatory comments. The businessman, Zebulon J. Brodie, contends that he was defamed by comments about his shop, a Dunkin' Donuts in Centreville, posted on NewsZap.com. The shop was described as one 'of the most dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places I have seen.' Talk about a Negative Nellie! At least the article didn't say the shop was the 'most dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places I have seen.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Changing planes here for NY/JFK.

Going to take the AirTrain into NY, this time I'm going to get on the LIRR in Jamaica and ride it into Penn Station.

I hear from people who are regular JFKers that this is much better than taking the A train fom Howard Beach, which is how I got there last time.

The guy behind me on the plane is talking on the phone, being very stern, and talking about screening a movie in DC for "Barak." He is wearing two hats. And being pretty rude to everyone around. Thankfully they don't allow people to use their phones when we're in the air.

I'm doing crosswords and watching an American Experience episode on the Crash of 1929. Remarkable how many parallels there are to 2008. Basically we unwound a lot of the regulations that were put in place after the crash, so we got another one.

People are telling the guy behind me that they "Love your work." Wonder who he is. Didn't get a good look. He's black and wearing two hats, and is kind of short but he doesn't look like Spike Lee. I'm so clueless. You can quote me.

I don't want to be rude and turn around and stare.

Last time I sat near someone famous on an airplane it was Suze Orman.

Wanna carry a gun onto an airplane? It's easy -- just get any government ID (the cards issued to part-time assistant harbor masters on Cape Cod will do) and then tell the TSA that you need a "flying while armed" form. Not only will they let you bring your gun onto the plane, they'll helpfully bring you into the cockpit (with your gun) and tell who who the undercover Sky Marshals are. That's just what forty-eight-year-old Stephen Grant of Rockland did (he didn't carry a gun on in the end). Don't worry, they've fixed it all now.

Oh, and please pretend that whole time that they were taking away your toothpaste and X-raying your shoes (for X-ray-invisible explosives!) that they weren't willing to allow anyone with a part-time assistant harbor master's badge carry a gun into the cockpit.

Grant denies lying. He once worked for a Coast Guard subcommittee, which is a division of Homeland Security. However, he is not an agent, officer or employee of Homeland Security and has never been authorized to represent himself as a DHS agent.

On the license to carry he obtained from the Rockland Police Department, Chief John Llewelyn notes, "He put down DHS and had a polo shirt with DHS embroidered on it."

Grant is charged with impersonating a federal agent and making false statements.

Man Accused Of Posing As Armed Federal Agent (via Schneier)

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Harvard University have developed a microfluidic device using ordinary paper and tape. Squares of paper are layered and connected them with adhesive tape, channeling liquid horizontally and vertically in a very small area. Each square of paper has been treated with photoresist material, which creates channels that funnel liquid into tiny wells containing certain proteins or antibodies. The fluid interacts with that area of the paper and turns the well a certain color. It can, for example, detect varying concentrations of glucose. Lead researcher George Whitesides says such paper "lab on a chip" tests may lead to a cost-effective, portable, and accurate method for diagnosing diseases in countries lacking reliable health care. The research appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Boing Boing Offworld, our John has the news that Warhammer Online is planning to erect (virtual) statues of the top players in prominent places.

Mythic's introducing a rather cool little addition to Warhammer Online, aimed at making outstanding players feel more like ineluctable legends of the game lore. Starting with patch 1.1, Mythic will reward the top ten players on each realm with statues of their characters in the main city centers.

I think it's a nice little touch. MMORPGs need more of these sorts of gestures to the player, incorporating their deeds and heroism into the fabric of the game lore to both inspire and garner the jealousy of their fellow players.

Warhammer Online to carve statuary of the top players Discuss this on Boing Boing Offworld

For many, many, many years there has been a very popular application called Dope Wars. I used to have a copy of it on my Palm Pilot a decade ago, and it was a fantastic way to kill time (that and Rally 1000 were great time wasters). Over the years, Dope Wars has shown up on many different platforms and many different versions. I just looked around, and it appears there are a variety of downloadable versions, some web-based versions, both a MySpace and Facebook app and many other things. There have also been a ton of derivative games, some taking the drug theme further, and some changing the theme of the game completely.

That's because, in actuality, Dope Wars has relatively little to do with drugs. It's really a classic trading game. You borrow money that you need to pay back (with interest) and then you go buy and sell goods at different location. The goal is simple: buy low, sell high, don't run into any catastrophe (police) and make back enough to pay back whoever you borrowed the money from. You could easily apply that to any sort of "commodity" -- and I've seen versions based on stock trading, middle ages commodity trading, space travel and a few other such things. The "drug" connection is pretty weak, and basically just gives a framework for what it is you're buying and selling.

Either way, back when I had that Palm Pilot, I played the game for many, many hours, and never had the slightest interest in following that up by taking or dealing any drugs. If someone's going to get interested in drugs, it's not going to be from playing such a game... but that hasn't stopped one woman from demanding that a version of the game created for the iPhone, called Underworld, be banned. Now, the woman's situation is tragic. She has a daughter who fell into a coma after taking heroin. That's clearly an awful situation. But it's difficult to think that the reason she took heroin was because she played a dopey trading game on a mobile phone somewhere.

Besides, why target just this iPhone version? This game, in some form or another, is found on pretty much every platform around (including TI calculators), often with multiple versions from different programmers -- and we've yet to see any evidence that playing the game leads anyone to be even slightly more disposed to taking drugs.

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Religious people seem to have a more negative view of nanotechnology than others, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin's Department of Life Sciences Communication rated 11 countries in Europe and the US on "religiosity" and then looked at their attitudes on nanotechnology. Professor Dietram Scheufele and his colleagues presented their results in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology. (From the BBC News:

They found that countries where religious belief was strong, such as Ireland and Italy, tended to be the least accepting of nanotechnology, whereas those where religion was less significant such as Belgium or the Netherlands were more accepting of the technology.

The US was found to be the most religious country in the survey, and also the least accepting of nanotechnology...

The researchers say it is understandable that there would be a conflict between religious belief and nanotechnology, especially when looking at what they call "nano-bio-info-cogno" (NBIC) technologies, the potential to create life at a nano scale without divine intervention.

"It's not that they're concerned about not understanding the science, more that talking openly about constructing life raises a whole host of moral issues," said Professor Scheufele.

Religious 'shun nanotechnology' (BBC News), Religious beliefs and public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe and the United States (Nature Nanotechnology)

Smivs writes with an excerpt from the BBC marking the anniversary of what may be the most famous tech demo outside Trinity site: "The humble computer mouse celebrates its 40th anniversary today. On 9 December 1968 hi-tech visionary Douglas Engelbart first used one to demonstrate novel ways of working with computers. The first mouse that Dr Engelbart used in the demo at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) was made of wood and had one button. Much of the technology shown off in the demo inspired the creation of the hardware and software now widely used. ... The mouse, which was built by Bill English, helped Dr Engelbart demonstrate how text files could be clipped, copied and pasted as well as showing ways of using computer networks to collaborate on projects or co-edit documents." According to the article, "A day of celebration is planned in California to mark the 40th anniversary; with many of the researchers behind the original demo reunited to mark the event."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK NO2ID group has produced a fantastic video about one of the dangers of Britain's new database state: Take Jane tells the story of a woman whose vengeful ex- is able to follow her around because she has to update the national ID database every time she moves, and any database that has that many people who are allowed to consult it will have someone her ex-husband can bribe to let him know where she's living at all time.

Take Jane (Thanks, Glyn!)

Wow, this video of the "Multiple Kill Vehicle Test" is crazy, it's some type of weapon from Lockheed Martin and it's scary. That said, what an amazing project and precision rocketry...

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This week I made the open source Trippy RGB Waves Kit by Mitch Altman. I like this kit because it's perfect for someone learning to solder, yet it has programming headers so the advanced user can hack it up. The original video was about 18 minutes long. Too long in my opinion, so I sped it up a bit. OK, a lot!

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If you have about 18 minutes to spare, and really like detailed step-by-step instructions, check out the full video in real-time below. Thanks!

In the Maker Shed:


Trippy RGB Waves Kit v1.0

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Den of Geek! compiled their top 50 favorite movie scenes "where the effects of drug-taking are depicted." When possible, they've also embedded YouTube clips of the scenes (hence the slow load of the pages). Their top five scenes are from:

1. Rosemary's Baby
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
4. Altered States (seen above, with a new trance soundtrack by Bedrock)
5. The Matrix

"Drugged! The top 50 trips in movies"

Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson writes:

The Philips Norelco Bodygroom ($50) is a shaver for men, specially tuned to the harmonic frequencies resonant with the hexagonal shafts of masculine hair for a shave that doesn't just cut your hair — it shatters it. (Or it's just a fancy double-edge electric clipper specifically marketed for men.)

Either way I tried one on various bits of my body, including, I discovered to my horror after I had already uploaded the video to the BBtv crew, what was to end up to be my exposed cock. Thankfully due to the magic of editing you can enjoy my aimless rambling without getting a flash of the juniors, which have been replaced with the soothing softness of a harmless kitten.

You can get an idea of how the Bodygroom works in the video, but here's a quick spoiler: I think the new Bodygroom is a pretty great, especially with the new attachments, although I don't know that it does a whole lot that you couldn't do with any other rechargeable clippers. Still, recommended.

Special thanks to fofurasfelinas for her very needed kitten pictures. And if you want a direct MP4 download, we have the technology.

Episode duration: 04:22.

Do let the fellas know what you think of this episode over in the Boing Boing Gadgets comments thread.

t3rmin4t0r writes "Google has announced its Google native client, which enables x86 native code to be run securely inside a browser. With Java applets already dead and buried, this could mean the end of the new war between browsers and the various JavaScript engines (V8, Squirrelfish, Tracemonkey). The only question remains whether it can be secured (ala ActiveX) and whether the advantages carry over onto non-x86 platforms. The package is available for download from its Google code site. Hopefully, I can finally write my web apps in asm." Note: the Google code page description points out that this is not ready for production use: "We've released this project at an early, research stage to get feedback from the security and broader open-source communities." Reader eldavojohn links to a technical paper linked from that Google code page [PDF] titled "Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code," and suggests this in-browser Quake demo, which requires the Native Code plug-in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brent Marcus of Current points us to a pretty cool animated version of a 30-year-old interview with John Lennon.

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon's "bed-in" phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.

I Met The Walrus (Current)

Source. (Thanks, Richard Metzger)

Nikon has announced updates to its Capture NX and Camera Control Pro software. The latest version of both extend support to the D3X. Version 2.1.1 of Capture NX also includes a number of fixes and improvements, including issues with non-display of GPS information and error messages while setting grey point on multiple images. Camera Control Pro 2.4.0 resolves minor issues pertaining to both Windows and Mac users.

For years, we've questioned why it makes sense for various songwriters' collection societies to charge a license fee for playing music in various restaurants and shops. In the past, most of the focus on enforcement has been in restaurants and bars, where music is more central to the experience -- but even then, it's always seemed like the music helps draw more interest in people going out and actually paying that musician for something. It's promotional. However, in the past few years, collections groups have become a lot more aggressive. From going after auto repair shops because their mechanics listened to radios in the garage that customers could hear in the waiting room (public performance!) to police stations where cops listened to music too loud (public performance!), these rights societies consistently seem to be shooting themselves in their collective feet.

The latest, sent in by Lawrence D'Oliveiro, involves a hairdresser in New Zealand who had the temerity to have a radio playing in her shop (public performance!). Of course, the real solution to this isn't to pay, but to stop playing music. Music is not central to the hairdressing process, though, by not playing music, the shop would certainly seem a lot less welcoming. Either way, the whole thing seems backwards. If they're playing the music off the radio, then it's been licensed already, and if it's off a personal CD or MP3 player, it's been paid for in other ways.

We're still waiting for the day when one of these collections societies goes after someone playing music in their car with the top or windows down (public performance!) or maybe someone on a beach with a radio (public performance!). Perhaps what they really want is for everyone to do everything with their own personal music players and earphones jacked in. There should be no sharing or promoting of music whatsoever without a special license.

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The 1970's Radios set on Flickr makes me yearn for the days when your personal music player was also a fashion/design statement. (Oh wait...) Transistor Radios' 1970's Radios Set (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Marina from Austria is a mouse agility trainer - check out this video of a mouse completing an entire course, it's really amazing! Via CuteOverload

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Monty on the Run

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The late psychedelic pioneer and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna was also an avid naturalist. His favorite specimens were his butterflies, more than two thousand of them netted in Indonesia and Columbia while McKenna was running from the law after a hashish bust forty years ago. Now, McKenna's daughter Klea has photographed the collection and created an interactive gallery and limited edition artist book with the material. BB pal Erik Davis, who knew Klea's father, had a sneak peak at the book and wrote a lovely review of it in his online journal. From Erik's post, titled "Terence McKenna's Butterflies":

When Klea—who is now a fine art photographer earning her MFA at the California College of the Arts—first began excavating the trunk in 2007, she discovered that none of the butterfly packets had been opened. As she unfolded the the specimens, she discovered something else: the pieces of paper had their own stories to tell. She photographed about a hundred or so of the specimens, along with their paper wrappings, and turned these images into The Butterfly Hunter, an interactive gallery show and now a gorgeous limited-edition signed artist book available—along with select images from the project—at her website. A remarkable visual meditation on time, loss, and the culture of nature, The Butterfly Hunter is also a fascinating engagement—intimate yet cool—with what Klea described to me as her father’s “fanatical romanticism.”

Klea grew up in the swirling penumbra of Terence’s peculiar shadow, and, like many children of famous and colorful folk, had to consciously define her own creative voice apart from her father’s world. In its first, gallery iteration, The Butterfly Hunter did not mention her father’s name, because she wanted the work to stand on its own merit. It is a mark of her courage that her book takes on Terence's legacy, and a mark of her success that she does it with such candor and care.

"Terence McKenna's Butterflies" by Erik Davis (Techgnosis.com), Klea McKenna's "The Butterfly Hunter" (kleamckenna.com)

floydman writes "Apparently the Egyptian government is paranoid about its community using GPS devices, to the degree that it demanded Apple remove any GPS functionality from its iPhone 3G. They claim that 'GPS functionality should be limited to military purposes.' Egyptian blogger Ahmed Gabr brought this issue up in another article, and talks about how this does not make sense, since Google maps and the like can be used. I also happen to know for a fact that most of the modern cars in Egypt have built-in GPS systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This "Magnetic Levitation Light Bulb" uses wireless energy transfer to power the floating bulb.The bulb is connected in parallel with a 100nF capacitor and copper wire coil and draws about 0.5 amps of current from the circuit below it. Check out the link below for the details on this interesting hack.

via Hacked Gadgets

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Pooktre of Queensland, Australia grow trees into some impressive furniture forms among various other designs. A craft requiring much care and planning, their tree-working designs can easily take years to grow to completion -

In 1986 Peter had the idea of growing a chair. Nine years later Peter and Becky became partners. Pooktre was born. Together they have mastered the art they call Pooktre, which is the shaping of trees as they grow in predetermined designs. Some are intended for harvest to be high quality indoor furniture and others will remain living art.

- Pooktre [via Environmental Graffitti]

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HOW TO - Grow A Chair: An interview with Richard Reames

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Smelly Jeffrey writes "According to a recent article, Indiana BMV Communications Director Dennis Rosebrough states that applicants for a new or renewed operator's license or state identification card will no longer be allowed to smile and say cheese. Apparently new facial recognition software being employed by the state fails to function when the face is distorted by something as innocuous as smiling. Also on the list of taboos are hats, eyeglasses, and hair that hangs down over the face. The article fails to mention, however, the legality of beards, mustaches, and bushy eyebrows." Similar restrictions are in place for the Enhanced Driver License (which serves as a sort of limited passport) implemented by the state of Washington, among others.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike was one of several readers to point out the release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, the first version of its flagship browser to switch on the much faster TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and sport a working privacy mode dubbed "Private Browsing." An ancillary addition to Private Browsing is a new addition to the "Clear Recent History" dialog box allowing users selectively to erase the last hour, the last two hours, the last four hours, today's, or all browsing history — previously, the wipe was all or nothing. This beta includes support for "web worker threads," a developing specification that will let Web-based application developers run background processes to speed up their apps. One feature present in Beta 1 is gone in the new beta: Ctrl-Tab switching. According to the developer, the UI needs more work; the feature probably won't be in the final 3.1.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

8-Bit Jesus: New Christmas Chip-tune Album by Doctor Octoroc via Waxy. He writes-

I’ve been working on a new album for the past few months and am releasing a free MP3 download of the first half - sort of a preview, I suppose. The album is entitled 8-Bit Jesus and contains 9 tracks thus far. Each one is a chip-tune version of a classic Christmas song done in the style of a different NES game.

Super Jingle Bros is fun :) Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

?This GameBoy mod (called the "LightBoy") replaces the internal incandescent lightbulbs found in a typical system with ultra-bright LEDs to both save on power for the unit, as well as to illuminate the backlight even brighter. Check out the link for the how-to on this simple, yet effective hack.

via GetLoFi

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During the 2006 World Cup, Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho made some headlines after his poor performance in the quarterfinal, when Brazil lost to France, was blamed on all-night sessions of sex and PS2 games. Supposedly his game of choice was EA Sports' FIFA 2006 soccer game, so it's slightly amusing to see an opposing goalkeeper credit a save he made on a Ronaldinho free kick last weekend to playing soccer games on his PlayStation. The goalie says that the game features a solid replication of Ronaldinho's penalty-taking style, giving him an idea of how to react in real life. As games become more and more realistic, more and more athletes and teams might start using them as scouting tools. Indeed, another soccer team recently signed a deal with the developer of a management simulation game to get exclusive access to its full database in order to help it identify new talent from around the world.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Photograph by Jonathan Jamieson

Jonathan Jamieson of Dumfries, Scotland, did more than whittle away his vacation in the summer of 2006. While on a break from school, he turned common bamboo barbecue skewers into a delicate sculpture that gracefully delivers a rolling metal ball bearing down a series of chutes and turns.

Jamieson built the 2-foot-tall wooden sculpture, and a smaller, dual-track one, in the glass garden room of his parents' house. The structures are rather delicate, so their 17-year-old architect probably won't be taking them to university when he goes to study mechanical engineering this fall.

But his parents have other messes to worry about. There's an entire room in their house devoted to their son's projects -- microcontrollers, an R/C car made from K'nex, a Van de Graaff generator that stands hair on end. There are also juggling and unicycling gear, guitars, and an amp cluttering up the room.

"I like the look of them," Jamieson says, explaining why he constructed the tracks. "It's fun watching these, because the ball keeps changing direction and, because you can't see a direct track, it looks like the ball is moving around randomly."

Working from the bottom up, Jamieson stacked 10-inch bamboo skewers into a scaffolding and connected them with 3-inch strips of garden wire. He didn't begin with a preconceived plan, so he had to adjust as he went. The ramp lengths and angles, for example, needed tweaking the higher he went, lest the ball get moving too fast and derail.

"You decide where you want to take it. That's the freedom of it," Jamieson says. "You have to test it constantly 'cause you often put something in and it goes wrong and you take the piece out and try again."

To show his far-flung friends his creation, Jamieson posted video of his sculptures in action on You Tube. The video-inspired comments include, "You are my idol!" and "Better than LSD." Guess they liked it.

>> Rolling Ball Sculpture: ohthebanter.com/rbs

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 13, page 25 - Megan Mansell Williams.

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?This huge, wall crushing robot looks like it might disrupt even the most rocking party.With an old school CRT as its head, it might be the ghost that DOS forgot.

Super-A

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This is a simple way to make an Arduino compatible circuit on a breadboard. The only additional components needed are a 0.1µF capacitor and a 1k resistor. This is amazingly simple. I have to try this out for myself.

Here is a recipe for using the atmega168 as a standalone arduino. It uses the internal oscillator of the arduino running at 8mhz, and is powered at 3.3 volts. I used this together with a xbee radio modem for my wind-up birds project.

More about How-to: Simple breadboard Arduino

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kpesler writes "Today, the Khronos Group released the OpenCL API specification (which we discussed earlier this year). It provides an open API for executing general-purpose code kernels on GPUs — so-called GPGPU functionality. Initially bolstered by Apple, the API garnered the support of major players including NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, and Intel. Motivated by inclusion in OS X Snow Leopard, the spec was completed in record time — about half a year from the formation of the group to the ratified spec."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This looks like it could be useful technique for your next build. At the very least, it is an interesting electrochemical experiment to try out. Just remember, copper sulphate is extremely poisonous, so keep your kiddies away.

More about How to electroplate with copper

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One of the biggest problems with any kind of regulations concerning "spam" is that people define it very differently -- with the core definition tending to be "anything I don't like" which is rather difficult to reduce into written regulation. That problem seems to be cropping up at Michigan State, where a student is being disciplined for spamming the faculty. The student was upset about a plan to shorten the 2009 fall semester, and sent emails to 391 faculty members, alerting them to the planned change, and pointing out how it could impact their syllabi and schedules. Apparently one out of the 391 professors complained about this as spam, and the school notes that its rules say email to more than 30 people is considered spam (the actual policy seems to leave some wiggle room, but not much).

While you could see how professors would get annoyed if they were constantly bombarded by students supporting different causes asking for help, it's still difficult to see how this particular use of the email system really counts as spam. Some are pointing out that, since Michigan State is a public university, it needs to protect students' free speech rights -- and disciplining this student goes against those rights. Overall, the fear should be that this sort of disciplinary process acts as a hindrance to public participation among students. If actually trying to get out the word on an issue, by sending emails to the folks who are impacted, is likely to get them disciplined, then won't people start to think twice before even bothering? Is that the message Michigan State is trying to send to its students?

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TokyoFlash, my preferred vendor of crazy, addictive, nonsensical high-tech LED watches, has just launched the Kisai Tenmetsu, a super-thin OLED-based watch that flashes and transitions between three colors to display the time using a perverse and delightful system ("Red LEDs indicate 15 units, amber LEDs indicate 5 units and green LEDs indicate 1 unit, a combination of which present hours, minutes, months and date.").

Kisai Tenmetsu

Create professional looking presentations without using PowerPoint or Keynote and do it all from the web. Or at least that is what SlideRocket promises to offer. SlideRocket is a powerful new web-based solution for designing and sharing your presentations. You can even design and present offline using SlideRocket's downloadable desktop application. If you are a blogger or business professional looking for a more than capable alternative to PowerPoint or Keynote, then SlideRocket is worth checking out. And best of all, SlideRocket is free. Photo credit: SlideRocket edited by Andre Deutmeyer When people think of online slide presentation tools, they have in mind websites like SlideShare. And two ideas go through their head: I like the capability of easily being able to share my presentations across the web. But that ease of sharing means that I have to sacrifice quality. When people think about PowerPoint or Keynote, they think exactly the opposite: I can create beautiful presentations. But I sacrifice the capability to share my presentation easily across the Web. SlideRocket bridges this divide between powerful-yet-constraining desktop presentation authoring tools and less-capable-but-infinitely-easier-to-distribute web presentations. SlideRocket combines the best of the two worlds by bringing the power of a desktop presentation tool like PowerPoint to the Web. With SlideRocket you can easily design beautiful presentations and share those presentations across the Web by simply embedding them into your own web page or linking to your presentation. If you need a physical copy of your presentation so your colleagues or boss can follow along, you can even download your presentation as a PDF file. Want to find out more about SlideRocket and how it works? Continue reading below for the full review. Here all the details: Intro by Andre Deutmeyer

SlideRocket Overview

SlideRocket is a complete web-based presentation application built on the Adobe Flex platform. For those looking for a viable alternative to PowerPoint or Keynote, this is it. SlideRocket has everything you would expect from a presentation application: ease of use; nice transitions; multiple text, image, and video effects and animations; and the ability to create charts and tables. You can even bring your old PowerPoint presentations to the Web by importing your PowerPoint files into SlideRocket (export is coming soon). But because SlideRocket is a web app, you have access to features that PowerPoint users can only dream of, such as: easy sharing of presentation assets (videos, images, and even whole slides / presentations) and collaboration on presentation authoring; dynamic charts via Google Spreadsheet integration; the capability to easily distribute your presentations across the Web through embeds and links; and much much more. As a free account, SlideRocket provides just about everything you need. To start off with you get 250MB of storage. The number of presentations you can create and save on SlideRocket is only limited by the amount of storage space you have. If 250MB is not enough storage for you, you can upgrade to one of SlideRocket's premium accounts to increase your storage allotment and gain access to new features. The presentation authoring (design) tools are the same regardless of the account type. You can link and embed your presentations anywhere on the Web, but you miss out on some of the access control features that are available to paying users as well as their analytics feature. If you are not overly worried about who, how many, and when your presentation was viewed, though, there is not much need to worry about this. As I mentioned earlier one of the greatest advantages to using SlideRocket is the capability to easily share your presentation assets and collaborate with your colleagues to create your presentation. Unfortunately, with free accounts, you do not get full access to this collaboration feature. But you still have a very nice feature that allows you to easily share your assets between different presentations you have created so if you want to reuse a slide / video / images from a past presentation, you can do so. Where you are limited is your capability to share your assets with other people and vice versa. Another advantage that you gain with SlideRocket is the capability to pull in assets (images, video, etc.) from multiple sources, whether it be directly from the Web or from your computer. Right now, though, the web integration is a bit limited. If you want to import an image from the Web to your asset library, SlideRocket only works with Flickr and a stock photo site called Fotolia, and although SlideRocket claims to allow you to pull in video from YouTube, when I was playing around with SlideRocket, this feature was missing. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of SlideRocket is their asset marketplace. This feature is still being expanded, but SlideRocket intends the asset marketplace to include everything from stock photos and videos to dynamic tables and charts - meaning that if you create a table using statistics from an outside source, for example Salesforce or Google Spreadsheets, when that data is updated later those changes will be reflected automatically in your table, saving you the hassle of having to go back and manually update that table. Finally, as lamentable as it may be, Internet is not yet everywhere so SlideRocket has also provided you with a feature to download an offline desktop application (running on Adobe AIR) so that you may design and present your presentation without having to be connected to the Web. Unfortunately the desktop application is not available for free accounts. You must upgrade to one of the premium accounts in order to download it. For a full description and examples of what SlideRocket is capable of, continue reading below.

Key Features

Like any good presentation application, presentation authoring tools are SlideRocket's focus. But it is what SlideRocket offers beyond the PowerPoint like presentation design features (i.e. what it does with the Web) that really make it interesting. Features include:

• Import PowerPoint
• Media Asset Library and Collaboration
• Tables and Charts
• Effects
• Transitions
• Hyperlinking
• Publishing and Sharing
• Analytics allow you to track who has been viewing your slide
• Desktop Application allows you to create and present your slides without being an internet connection

Below is a graphical tour of these key features with details about how they work. Check out the slide shows (built using SlideRocket) as well.

Import PowerPoint

If you have old PowerPoint presentations that you want to bring new life to, SlideRocket lets you import those old presentations into SlideRocket so that you can easily share your presentation with friend, colleagues, and strangers alike. SlideRocket even keeps the slides in your presentation editable.

Media Asset Library and Collaboration

SlideRocket's intergrated media asset library provides quick access to all of your presentations, slides, and other assets - including shared videos and images from other users in your organization - that can be easily added to your presentations (see the slide show above for examples of media that you can include). Unfortunately, collaboration on presentation authoring and media sharing with your colleagues is only available if you are a premium member. SlideRocket is also building a resource marketplace where you can access 3rd party apps and resources to help build your presentations. SlideRocket lets you import your own images, flash animations, and video from your computer. Or you can search for community clip art, purchase professional stock photos, or import images and video from Flickr or YouTube. Although when trying to upload a video from YouTube, I did not see the option. Flickr photo upload seems to work fine though. And of course, all your media assets are taggable, sortable, and easy to locate using built in SlideRocket's search bar.

Effects

SlideRocket allows for a multitude of effects and filters that can be applied to your slides. Drop shadows, glow effects, and reflections are among a few of the effects that can be applied to the text, image, and video in your slide. See the above slide for some examples.

Transitions

SlideRocket provides a nice selection of transitions that can be applied to your slides. CubeRotate, Reflection, Swap, and Flip are among a few of the transitions that can be used. See the above slide show for a demonstration.

Tables and Charts

You can display your data in an easily digestible format with SlideRocket's fully styleable tables and charts. Use shapes and drawing tools to add annotations or diagrams. And best of all you can create dynamic tables (tables that update automatically) by syncing them to Google Spreadsheets or Salesforce. See the above slide show for more information.

Hyperlinking

Linking is the currency of the Web. And SlideRocket does not disappoint in this respect either. SlideRocket lets you easily hyperlink any element in the slide. Check out the above slide for examples.

Publishing and Sharing

Instead of trying to email huge PowerPoint files, with SlideRocket you can share your presentation by sending a simple URL or even embedding it into your web page. If you prefer to keep your presentation confidential, you can limit your invitation to specific people. The privacy option is only available to premium accounts. Also if you need to host a remote meeting, SlideRocket allows you to do this right through their interface. Don't bother with WebEx. SlideRocket lets you invite multiple attendees to view your presentation while you control it. SlideRocket does not support VoIP so you will still have to use Skype or a similar application if you want to talk. The host meeting option is also only available to premium accounts.

Analytics

SlideRocket's built in analytics lets you see who has been looking at your presentations and how long they've been viewing each slide. I have not had a chance to use this feature because it is only accessible if you have a premium account. Although, according to SlideRocket you can

"get details on how long each slide was viewed and what your viewers did as a result by tracking user interactions like link clicks, form data submissions and forwards. Sort by location, viewer, date and time spent."

Offline Player

You can use SlideRocket offline through their downloadable application (built on the Adobe AIR platform). Although SlideRocket plans to make to all the authoring capabilities of the online version available to you offline and let you your presentation sync back up with your online account once you have reestablished internet connection, at the moment this is not the case. SlideRocket Offline Player only allows you to download completed presentations and present them. This option is only supposed to be available to premium accounts, however there is a little trick to getting a hold of the offline player without a premium account. First make sure that you have Adobe AIR installed, then go to this page, download the SlideRocket Offline Player, and install the application. Once the application is installed, all you need to do is enter your login credentials and then select the presentations that you want to download. I know it works because I just did it.

Key Strenghts and Areas for Improvement

go to the table!

Editor's Comments

I was very impressed with SlideRocket. SlideRocket includes all the best features of the desktop apps - professional quality design tools - and adds a centralized asset library to store and share your slides and assets, access to third party assets, remote meetings, and more. I have never been much a fan of PowerPoint... and I have never used Keynote, but I can honestly say that using SlideRocket to build the presentations above was nearly effortless. The one feature I found especially nifty was SlideRocket's integrated asset library. Almost half of the slides and assets that I used to create my own presentations, I borrowed from the demo presentation that SlideRocket makes available to all its members. So if you watch the original SlideRocket demo presentation, you will find many similarities. I cannot but stress the convenience that this function offers and the ease with which it allows you to create your presentations. Furthermore, the idea of an online marketplace for images, videos, data, and application that can be placed into your presentations is an intriguing one. And although the marketplace is still in its nascent stages, I am excited at the possibilities that such marketplace offers SlideRocket users. Overall, SlideRocket has done a great job of creating a presentation tool that goes beyond traditional presentation tools by harnessing the power of the web while also allowing you to present offline. SlideRocket rivals the functionality of desktop tools like PowerPoint and Keynote, but goes way beyond them by offering features only possible with a web-based application. Before you throw down money for PowerPoint or Keynote, go give SlideRocket a spin. You will not be disappointed.

Additional Resources

• Sign up for SlideRocket
• Pricing plans for SlideRocket
• Official Product Tour of SlideRocket
• A List of other SlideRocket Demos

Do you see any mistakes? Would you like to share your own experiences with SlideRocket? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 9th 2008 as Create Professional Presentations Without PowerPoint: The Web-Based Alternative Has Arrived - SlideRocket Reviewed.

If you need some more decorations for the holiday, give this project a try. It's a paper star ornament that can be made from recycled materials. I like the fact that it folds up into a neat little book when the holidays are over.

Learn how to make Star ornaments

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If you need some more decorations for the holiday, give this project a try. It's a paper star ornament that can be made from recycled materials. I like the fact that it folds up into a neat little book when the holidays are over.

Learn how to make Star ornaments

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If you need some more decorations for the holiday, give this project a try. It's a paper star ornament that can be made from recycled materials. I like the fact that it folds up into a neat little book when the holidays are over.

Learn how to make Star ornaments

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If you need some more decorations for the holiday, give this project a try. It's a paper star ornament that can be made from recycled materials. I like the fact that it folds up into a neat little book when the holidays are over.

Learn how to make Star ornaments

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In covering DIY technology from Japan, there have been quite a few kits and projects that have come along that would be of interest to makers outside of Japan, but are either not available for overseas ordering, or are available but may be subject to high shipping costs and long waits. Luckily, one very consistent source of excitement in the world of DIY kits and resources in Japan is Gakken, the publishers of magazine Otona no Kagaku (Sophisticated Science for Adults), and in addition to their magazine that includes a new DIY kit with each issue, they also produce a wonderful line of stand-alone kits. Lucky for residents of the US, the Maker Shed is proud to be the exclusive US distributor of Gakken's line of Sophisticated Science Kits for Adults, as well as their Mechanical Animals Series, thus saving you, the maker, from exorbitant overseas shipping rates and unbearable overseas shipping wait times. Gakken's kits provide the perfect mix of DIY, science, and history as they entertain as well as educate.

Below is an extended list of the Gakken kits that we have in the Maker Shed with descriptions of each item. You may have seen some of these items such as the hack-loving SX-150 Analog Synthesizer and the Mini-Theremin on the Make Blog before, but this list also includes some of the lesser-known gems like the Gravity Clock, the Stereo Pinhole Camera, and the New Edison-style Phonograph. Check 'em out:

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In covering DIY technology from Japan, there have been quite a few kits and projects that have come along that would be of interest to makers outside of Japan, but are either not available for overseas ordering, or are available but may be subject to high shipping costs and long waits. Luckily, one very consistent source of excitement in the world of DIY kits and resources in Japan is Gakken, the publishers of magazine Otona no Kagaku (Sophisticated Science for Adults), and in addition to their magazine that includes a new DIY kit with each issue, they also produce a wonderful line of stand-alone kits. Lucky for residents of the US, the Maker Shed is proud to be the exclusive US distributor of Gakken's line of Sophisticated Science Kits for Adults, as well as their Mechanical Animals Series, thus saving you, the maker, from exorbitant overseas shipping rates and unbearable overseas shipping wait times. Gakken's kits provide the perfect mix of DIY, science, and history as they entertain as well as educate.

Below is an extended list of the Gakken kits that we have in the Maker Shed with descriptions of each item. You may have seen some of these items such as the hack-loving SX-150 Analog Synthesizer and the Mini-Theremin on the Make Blog before, but this list also includes some of the lesser-known gems like the Gravity Clock, the Stereo Pinhole Camera, and the New Edison-style Phonograph. Check 'em out:

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An anonymous reader writes "Intel has developed a device, the Avalanche Photodetector, that senses light pulses and amplifies output signals for faster data transfer over long distances. Researchers claim this is a big advancement in the field of silicon photonics, in which silicon is used to transfer light pulses for data exchange between chips and devices. APD can detect light at higher frequencies and moves data at rates of 40Gbps, making it more sensitive and quicker than earlier photodetectors, at a tenth the cost."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IT’S EMAIL TIME - Innocent-looking “clock” monitors the unread-message pileup in your inbox - by Tom Igoe.

I have a lot of anxiety about email. Every kilobyte in my Inbox destroys another minute of my life, but I can’t stop checking it. So I decided to embody my anxiety in a device that would worry about my incoming mail for me. I’ve always liked clockwork mechanisms, so I made my email fetish object in the form of a clock. For each kilobyte of new mail I receive, the clock ticks relentlessly forward.

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Games writer and MUD inventor Richard Bartle was startled to discover that a new World of Warcraft mission includes the option of torturing a captive for information, using "some kind of cow poke." When he wrote critically about this, he was deluged with Warcraft-lovers who wanted him to, you know, chill out, it's only a game, you know. His thoughtful response raises a lot of difficult and meaty questions about fantasy play.

I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. Worse, the quest is part of a chain you need to complete to gain access to the Nexus, which is the first instance you encounter (if you start on the west of the continent, as I did). So, either you play along and zap the guy, or you don't get to go to the Nexus.

I did zap him, pretty well in disbelief — I thought that surely the quest-giver would step in and stop it at some point? It didn't happen, though. Unless there's some kind of awful consequence further down the line, it would seem that Blizzard's designers are OK with breaking the Geneva convention...

When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting. It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. JKR can put that kind of stuff in her books if she likes, freedom of speech being what it is and all, but it's shattered your expectations. I wasn't expecting consequence-free torture quests in WoW. Getting one was a shock.

Torture (part 1), Tortuous Replies... (part 2) (via Wonderland)

Rogue archivist Carl Malmud sez,

The transition has asked that all documents submitted to the review process be available to the public. Public.Resource.Org has submitted 5 1-page policy proposals:

1. Rebooting .Gov. How the Government Printing Office can spearhead a revolution in governmental affairs.
3. FedFlix. Government videos are an essential national resource for vocational and safety training and can also help form a public domain stock footage library, a common resource for the YouTube and remix era.
4. The Library of the U.S.A. A book series and public works job program to create an archival series of curated documents drawn from our cultural institutions, with full-quality masters of the books and research materials made available for other publishers to draw on. The program would employ the GPO master printers and would recruit writers, archivists, artists, and other creative workers through a national call for participation.
5. The United States Publishing Academy. GPO should expand current training programs such as the Institute for Federal Printing and combine them with current workforce development efforts to create a national academy similar to the National Mine Academy and the National Fire Academy, training its own workforce, the government, and the local schools in the art, craft, and science of publishing.
6. The Rural Internetification Administration. Repurposing the Amateur Radio League, modifying spectrum policy, and injecting capital into rural coops can bring high-speed broadband to 98% of rural Americans just as the Rural Electrification Administration did in the last century.

Needless to say, all ideas and instantiations of those ideas are in the public domain. No patents, no trademarks, no service marks, no copyright. Just some ideas for change.

5 Suggestions For Change (Thanks, Carl!)

Matthew sez, "This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the 'mean' and 'best' fitness."

Genetic Algorithm (Thanks, Matthew!)

In this frightful and festive HOWTO, Are Sundnes takes us through the simple process by which a boring Barbie doll is converted into a wonderful zombie playmate.

Behind Barbie of the Undead (via Wonderland)

Flickr user AbbieTabbie makes astonishingly awesome, detailed nursery-rhyme cupcakes that evinced two involuntary reactions from me: my jaw dropped and my salivary glands started pumping.

Nursery Rhyme Cupcakes (Thanks, Amelia!)

Here's an Instructable from Mikamika explaining how to rip apart an electric toy piano and wire it into a shirt, turning your chest into a playable instrument.

A Toy Piano embedded on a T-shirt. It has 8 keys from Do to Do (1 octave). You can play simple music by wearing the shirt and pushing the fabric button on the shirt. All the components from the toy piano (batteries, speaker, circuit board) are placed on the shirt and connected with poppers. All these hard components are detachable so that you can wash it if you wish.

Wearable Toy Piano (via Craft)

The powerful and innovative Service Employees International Union is trying to unionize bank workers, saying that if the banks are going to get a public bailout, workers should have a seat at the table.

"We believe there is special responsibility for companies who receive taxpayer dollars to ensure their workers have a voice on the job," SEIU's Lynda Tran said. "And those workers should have a seat at the table at the companies where decisions that impact the future of their families and the companies that employ them" are made.

Citing bailout, union wants to organize bank workers

mhelander writes "In his weblog Roger Alsing describes how he used genetic programming to arrive at a remarkably good approximation of Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons. His blog entry includes a set of pictures that let you see how 'Poly Lisa' evolved over roughly a million generations. Both beautiful to look at adn a striking way to get a feel for the power of evolutionary algorithms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don Bartlett, a manager for some musicians, has written in to point out a letter that he wrote to Bob Lefsetz outlining the successful strategy he's had in promoting one of his acts and asked for the thoughts of folks around here:

We decided to put an offer up on Joe's website and MySpace. We told any fan that if they knew anyone who might be interested in Joe's music that they could send us an email and we send them as many copies of a two-song sampler CD as they wanted. Free. We even cover the postage. To keep costs down, we invested in a cd publishing system that burns and prints them robotically. Each CD has two songs, contact info, MySpace, and a reminder that the full cd was at iTunes. If someone lived near a place where a show was scheduled, we printed that show info on there as well. People requested as few as 2 and as many as 50. We sent all of them. Requests continued to pour in, and the more we sent out the faster the new requests came in. We're at the point now where we get about 15 a day. Joe writes a thank you in each and every one. And almost instantly, sales took off. Attendance jumped noticeably and MySpace/website action began a steady upward arc. More importantly, we built an incredible database of his most hardcore fans. And after receiving a mailbox full of cds for free, they are willing to do anything to help forward the cause. And it is the ultimate in target marketing.... you have people who already like your music passing it on to their friends, whose tastes they presumably know.

The idea is definitely a bit different, but obviously can and does work on a small scale. The problem is that it wouldn't scale to a really large number very easily. It's also somewhat costly. Even if they've decreased the production costs, there are still costs in terms of resources, time and postage for every free CD they send out. It's good that it's allowed them to more closely connect with fans (and turn them into true fan promoters), but it seems risky to spend so much on promotions. So, while it can work on a small scale, and help a musician stand out as being especially fan friendly, it seems like it could be pretty costly if you tried to scale it up.

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Here's an interesting contest: recycle discarded mattresses into useful products! Deadline has been extended to December 19:

The competition aims to encourage entrants to form groups capable of creating a consumer product, instructions detailing how to make the product, and a plan for production on a larger scale. Entrants must create designs that take into account the volume of mattress waste generated each year. Groups are encouraged to utilize local resources, including existing manufacturing facilities and other waste products.

Via Core77.

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An anonymous reader lets us know about a new initiative designed to help shield the open source software community from threats posed by patent trolls. The initiative, called Linux Defenders (the website is slated to go live tomorrow, Dec. 9), is sponsored by a consortium of technology companies including IBM. "The most novel feature of the new program... will be its call to independent open source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders... so that the group's attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a 'defensive publication.' Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the US Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sprint and Cogent were recently kind enough to remind us that the Internet is held together by rather tenuous peering deals to share traffic across providers. As such, some arcane disputes can aggravate to levels that disrupt normal consumers ability to use the Internet. If you weren't convinced that the good will of sysadmins keeps the series of tubes clear, two recent examples will show just how informal they can all be, and it raises some questions about the ability of "mob rule" to force certain decisions.

In the past couple of months, two hosting companies who were known to be havens for spammers and cyber-criminals, have been brought offline through extralegal means. Following some pretty damning reports of the illegal uses of McColo and Intercage, the upstream ISPs servicing the hosting companies decided to pull the plug and disconnect them from the internet. Basically, a couple of ISP admins decided that they didn't want to be responsible for providing service to those companies so they cut them off. At first blush, these seem like effective actions taken against criminals -- some reports showed spam amounts dropping 66% following McColo's deathblow. However, is this really the precedent we want? Lynch mob justice, even when well meaning, can inflict collateral damage and occasionally pick the wrong targets leading to significant damage with little recourse.

Some have equated these types of actions with a Neighborhood Watch program -- good intentioned folks driving off negative influences. But the key difference is the lack of legal authority and due process. Neighborhood watches call the police when illegal activity is detected. While it is true that McColo and Intercage were neutered much more quickly through extralegal means than if police had tried to understand the system and work through the courts, there are still very good reasons why we should support traditional legal prosecution.

An internet where ISPs can cut off service without explanation may be a very unstable platform, indeed. The checks and balances (eroded as they may be) of the legal system do a pretty good job at finding the best course of action, and we shouldn't rush to a future of lynch mobs. Lynch mobs (digital or not) have the unfortunate habit of negative side effects like choosing the wrong target or cutting off innocent users in the process. At least one ISP who cut off the criminal hosts claimed that they did so because the Terms of Service were being violated, but if they want to limit online crime, it would be best to utilize their leverage by working with law enforcement. After all, a phisher disconnected from the Internet can just move to another hosting provider where they will be less likely to be reached by America's comparatively stronger cybercrime laws.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Man, this is super cute... Obento! "Cute lunches made for me by my girlfriend!" - her site is here.

Nintendo DS Bento.

Amazing bento art.

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Check out this neat wearable toy piano made by instructables user mikamike, it's hacked from a toy and uses conductive thread and fabric buttons. Via Fashioning Technology.

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anerva writes "Black market criminals are offering to sell details on 21 million German bank accounts for €12M ($15.3M), according to an investigative report (German; Google translation) published Saturday. In November reporters for WirtschaftsWoche (Economic Week) had a face-to-face meeting with criminals in a Hamburg hotel, according to the magazine. Posing as buyers working for a gambling business, the journalists were able to strike a price of €0.55 per record, or €12M for all the data. They were given a CD containing the 1.2 million accounts when they asked for assurances that the information they would be buying was legitimate." 21 million is three in four existing German bank accounts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Does it have an API?

Funny thought perhaps, or maybe only in the Bay Area -- but our subway system -- BART, has an API. And it's kind of fun. I spent a couple of hours today hacking together an application, it's not all that useful, but one of these days something else will get an API that plugs in nicely and something interesting will happen.

Here are the docs for the BART API.

And the docs for the real-time ETA feed.

And the ETA feed itself.

Clearly it's a straight dump of the database of the BART trains that are running right now, and the time of their expected arrival at the various stations on the network.

I wrote an app that loads the XML into a database on my server once a minute, it's quite quick -- and then it looks for trains that are arriving right now, and sends a tweet saying something like: "The train to Richmond is arriving at the Downtown Berkeley BART station."

This would generate far too many tweets to be humane, no one in their right mind would want to follow a user that was announcing the arrivals of every train in every station on the BART network, which isn't even that big a network. You can imagine what a PITA that app would be for a subway system like NY or London. Not cool.

So instead I had it only report on trains arriving from any direction at the three Berkeley BART stations, Ashby, Downtown and North Berkeley. That's a manageable number of tweets. And that suggested a name for the feed: BerkeleyBart. Which sounds like something from a cowboy cartoon or a Henry Fonda western starring Jimmy Stewart and Raquel Welch with Buddy Hackett as the kooky sidekick. Okay enough of that.

It's a cute little thing, nothing earth-shaking, but I wonder if it's correct. Next time I'm at a Berkeley BART station I'll check it out and see if it correctly calls the arrivals of trains.

Also it seems like just the thing Scoble will like. He's into trains and Twitter and really strange things. I've also set it up so it works with FriendFeed.

A bunch of folks have been sending in the various news stories about a new report recommending to the incoming presidential administration a set up a national cybersecurity policy, which is the sort of broad pronouncement that many people would instinctively agree with. However, it's not really clear what this covers. The report covers both government and private companies' computer networks, as if the issues and challenges facing each should be covered under a single plan. There's also talk of some new kind of warrant called "data warrants" rather than search warrants. Obviously, protecting internet infrastructure from foreign attacks is a good thing, but there's a lot here that seems like a grab for power -- and the ability to more closely gather and monitor data.

The fact that government networks and security of government computers is a mess is one issue, but it shouldn't be mixed in with private companies protecting their own data. The two issues should be tackled separately. If the government needs to fix its own computer network and security policies, that seems like a reasonable job for the national CIO that Obama has indicated is a part of his plan, rather than a separate cybersecurity policy.

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narramissic writes "Back on November 29, MySQL developer Michael Widenius trashed Sun's decision to give MySQL 5.1 a 'generally available' designation in a now-infamous blog post. Widenius warned users to be 'very cautious about MySQL 5.1' because 'there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.' And now we get Sun's response. In an interview Monday, Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun's database group, said, 'I learned over many years about the benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source. A little bit of debate never hurts. This is part of being an open-source company. ... People are free to blog about what they want.' Doubtless, this will do nothing to end the debate over whether Widenius will follow fellow MySQL co-founder David Axmark's lead and leave Sun."

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I traveled to the Twin Cities to shoot the Maker Workshop segments of Make: television, so I needed to bring along a lot of my tools, materials, supplies, and parts. Both for on-screen making, and hotel room tinkering. Sometimes, we figured out how to present our projects at the eleventh hour, so I had one night to cook up a demo to fit the new talking points. (Bill Gurstelle was probably up a lot later than I was, building brand new trebuchets and such...)

Once, I forgot to bring solder. I ended up twisting lots of wires together in my room late at night. I ought to get a big Pelican case or tackle box full of gear, that's ready to go. You never know when you'll be called on to hack something together in the field. Anyone have suggestions for their mobile workshop?

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Today on Offworld, we saw stunning side-by-side comparisons of the real D.C. versus the post-nuclear version in Fallout 3, watched Dragon Quest in ballet form, noted that the classic Space Invaders would be coming along with its latest futurist remake, and thought about the right and wrong ways to present in-game ads. We also looked at Scribblenauts, a new DS game from 5th Cell that promises to make 'anything' you can think of a usable object in the game, coveted Meat Bun's latest gaming T-shirt designs, watched how a budding love story was scrapped as Left 4 Dead's opening cinematic evolved, and got deep with an existentialist meditation by way of Paperboy, Tapper, and Balloon Fight. Finally, we listened to '8-bit Jesus', a new chiptune Xmas album that reinterprets holiday hits in the style of NES soundtracks, got even more retro with extruded 3D dioramas of 2D classics like Mario, Zelda and Pokemon, heard unsubtle hints of a new Crackdown sequel, looked at Gish creator Edmund McMillan's new video game mashup "album", and, most amazingly, learned how to build a portable talkbox with a bendy straw and the DS's Korg software synth so that we might remake Pete Drake's Forever in handheld form.

gadgetopia writes "Although data 'calls' on 21Mbps networks and equipment have been made in the labs and in demonstrations, Australia is the first place in the world where such a call has been made on a commercial, deployed 21Mbps eHSPA network, with a full commercial launch due early 2009."

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From the all-important step #2 of this Instructable: "Don't Poison Gas Attack Yourself, etc."

Useful for anyone who wants to make welds without spending much:

Welding is usually the easiest and quickest way to build something. You just put the parts next to each other and weld them. You don't have to drill bolt holes and go to the hardware store for bolts. Metal doesn't split like wood. It doesn't have grain and knots that make every piece different. You can get all kinds of scrap metal for free. Bed frames, parts of old cars, etc etc. And you can make your own welder for free or close to it.

Don't have access to a welder? LIAR!! All it takes is some junk car batteries and a welding rod.
Or some dead microwave ovens to butcher for the transformers.
Make your own industrial revolution!

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